Work In Progress is a growing community of bloggers who focus on, support and promote the magic 51%. That’s the tipping point for professional and entrepreneurial women, who make up 51% of the workforce and own 51% of small businesses. We are part women-to-women advice and solutions, and part cheerleading and collaboration. Our goal is your success.

5 Courses of the Content Marketing Meal

At any moment in time, consumers are enjoying different parts of the content that you serve to them. While your main source for your content is most likely your company blog or website, audience members could be reading and viewing different pieces of content at the same time.

Furthermore, they could be viewing the content at your main source, or they could view it anywhere else across the social web where you’ve cross-promoted it or other people and websites have discussed it and shared it. To be successful at content marketing, you need to be able to satisfactorily feed your audience of content diners who consume content in different ways, in different places, and at different times.

The best way to do it is to offer a complete content dining plan that accounts for each of the five main courses of the content marketing meal and satisfies the target audience no matter where they are in that meal. Your goal is not only to motivate consumers to come to your “content restaurant” but to keep them coming back and to bring other people with them.

Following are the five most important courses of the content marketing meal that you need to continuously serve in order to satisfy as many consumers as possible:

1. Binge Content

Content binging happens when a person quickly consumes snippets of massive amounts of content. For example, they might click on dozens of links in their Twitter feed and read bits and pieces of many articles. They might watch the first minute of numerous videos or keep clicking on links on a website and reading the first couple of paragraphs of each page they visit that looks interesting.

With this audience in mind, make sure you’re serving a binge content course in your content marketing meal plan, so people can quickly consume snippets of your content at any moment in time. Tools like Pinterest, Twitter, and related post links on your company blog are very effective in satisfying binge content needs.

2. Taste-Test Content

Some people like to sample small bits of content rather than consuming large pieces of content. It’s essential that you offer ways for people to taste-test your content, too. Before they’ll consider trying your main course, you need to entice them with mouth-watering samples.

Using tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube, you can create and share samples with your target audience for them to try anytime they want. Never underestimate the power of content samples and taste-testing.

3. Consumptive Content

The main course of your content marketing meal plan is consumptive content. This is content that your target audience reads or views thoroughly. Once you entice people with your content samples and they make an effort to get more content from you, they expect to find useful, meaningful, or entertaining content (depending on your brand promise).

Therefore, you need to make an effort to create high quality content on your blog, in ebooks, in online presentations, in podcasts, and so on. The goal is to not just have people consume your content from start to finish but for your content to become their favorite content.

4. Preferred Content

Once your target audience has consumed your content main course, you need to continue to deliver high quality content that meets their expectations for your brand. The goal is to ensure your content becomes the audience’s preferred content.

When people become loyal to your content and return to your website or other branded online destinations to consume your content again and again, you’ve reached an important milestone in content marketing success.

5. Required Content

Loyal content consumers are likely to talk about your content, share it with their own audiences, and even buy from you. This leads to the fifth course of the content marketing meal where your content is not just preferred by your target audience but it’s required. In other words, they won’t accept anything else, and they advocate your content (and your brand) to anyone who will listen.

Your content is the source they turn to for anything related to the topics you publish content about, and they want everyone else they know to feel the same way. It’s at this point in the content marketing meal that word-of-mouth marketing can grow significantly and sales should follow.

Have you prepared your content marketing meal plan yet? Do you have all five courses covered in order to engage with consumers at anytime and in any place? Don’t expect them to conform to your wants and needs. Instead, consistently deliver the meal they want, and they’ll come back for more. And they’ll tell their friends, too.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

Nice post. I like the analogy. I think its useful in explaining the value and different aspects of content marketing to someone who may be unfamiliar. I wrote about this in a similar way, too – and even used the meal analogy: http://www.subjectivelyspeaking.net/2010/11/10/dinner-time-with-content-marketing-a-meal-analogy/

Alan, It’s great to hear from a like-minded marketer. The meal analogy is an easy one to apply to most aspects of marketing. Anything to help small business owners look at marketing through a simpler lens and better understand the fundamentals is what matters to me, particularly these days when so many “social media marketers” and “content marketers” have very little (or no) marketing experience at all!

Great article. For me the hardest part is how to entice those readers who are just binging. You must be able to entice them by providing a very enticing headline. And of course you should be able to keep them reading your article, maybe by making it personal, like you believe the same things that they believe so they can easily relate.

Thank you! I agree with you that enticing the binge audience is challenging. This is where audience segmentation is critical. Which of the bingers are the ones you could actually convert into repeat “customers”? It’s probably safe to assume that most of the bingers won’t become repeat visitors or loyal customers, but finding that segment of the binge audience that you can convert into repeat visitors and customers is what’s most important about this audience. Also, the other critical component is creating highly shareable binge content, so it has the chance to get in front of your target audience.

I really like the concept of these content marketing courses. Preferred content is one of the most important. Feedback and engagement from your target audience is essential for discovering the type of content that is consumed. Look to your target audience to find the type of information is meaningful and relevant to them. This helps companies generate content that your customer/consumer “requires.”